Before I even clicked it I knew there would be no real journalism involved. It’s just parroting the video the LegalEagle put out, so if you’d rather give your click to the creator, just watch the Youtube video, and don’t bother with the techcrunch “article”.
This article credits Legal Eagle, embeds the original, is much shorter to read than an 8-minute video and doesn’t require me to wear headphones. Lemmy is a text based social media so it makes sense to favour text sources. Definitely better than linking to some overloaded Invidious instance which seems to be the norm.
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I believe in the right to quote which is also the law in most of the world because of Berne Convention.
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If YouTube videos are what “modern journalism” has to offer, modern journalism is trash.
I have absolutely zero interest in watching an eight minute video to gain what I could have read in two minutes.
I don’t need to see anybody 's face or hear any stupid music or, even worse, watch them talk over another video as they present the information. 90% of what these people do would be more effective presented textually, and the rest is ads, vamping, and narcissism.
YouTube is great for spreading misinformation and propaganda, and wasting people’s time. Let’s move on.
You’re so angry lol. Just don’t watch it jeez.
I don’t like watching videos.
Me either, and Im glad for text summaries.
Exhausting. Like the people who used to yell at us for using straws. Your anger is misplaced at individuals.
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As much as I enjoy watching LTT content, I have to speak out about how they realized Honey was fucking them and then said NOTHING to their audience or to other YouTubers. I think that is just plain shitty of them and has put a sour taste in mouth with their content now. If they did say something, I apologize. I just haven’t seen it since the only “social media” I use is this singular one, Lemmy.
He said on the WAN show that when they dropped Honey a few years ago, the news was going around all over creator circles and a lot of other creators dropped them then too. And they didn’t make a video because at the time only the affiliate yoinking was known, and the audience would probably call them shills for making a video about how they’re losing money due to their audience saving money.
I don’t think his defense is 100% airtight, but it’s useful context.
Linus also repeatedly says LMG is not your friend. He knows he fucks the audience over sometimes and wants to absolve himself of it but he’s got 100 people on payroll that he needs to capture the surplus labour from.
I mean, is it saving users money though? It’s not, the charge is that it’s just taking other affiliate code out of the link and replacing it with its own. And just doing it to small creators? I don’t know that much about it, maybe that last part isn’t true. But it’s not saving them money that’s the problem, but replacing affiliate links with their own. And they’re saying that it’s just that they were the “last click,” even if it was from an affiliate site. Meaning they probably put it in their code somewhere to briefly load honey looking for “deals,” meaning they were the last one to redirect the click and then they get the money.
Will be interesting to see how they were doing it.
Honey would look for coupom codes, and sometimes it would find them, it wasn’t always, but also wasn’t never, so yes, they were “saving money” for the user as far as people knew at the time. After MegaLag’s video we know that the whole “find all available and working coupons to guarantee the best deal” was horseshit, and they were in partnership with business controlling the whole thing, but back when LTT and other creators dropped Honey, that part wasn’t known yet, just that they poached affiliate links. Which is very scummy, but likely not illegal.
I dunno. Because when creators are pushing those affiliate links, they’re offering discounts. That’s why their users go there. And if honey was giving them a bigger discount, I’m sure that’s not illegal. But if it was just poaching the 10% 94 whatever the creator was already offering, giving them still 10%, but taking that “last click” because it checked?
Who knows, the company is bigger and has PayPal at its back. So might makes right in US law. I’m sure that will be the outcome. But I’ve been surprised before.
Affiliate links generally have nothing to do with discounts. Coupon codes do, and custom shop urls also often do, but I don’t think those were poached by honey, as they require manual input. Many creators just have affiliate links from amazon (for example) where they just list tools/stuff they used in their videos under the description and you can buy stuff at no extra cost and support the creator. You can also buy the same stuff for the same price by just going to Amazon, and the creator gets nothing. E.g. LTT could have a pc build video and list all the parts on newegg with their affiliate links, they don’t need any special partnership for the video, just to be part of neweggs affiliate program. This is hugely important for smaller content creators that don’t have the pull to get partnerships.
Plenty of creators I watch have links instead of coupon codes. So it’s not just broadly one way
I don’t enjoy watching ltt anymore since a good few years, but I’m still going to come to their defence :)
They discussed dropping Honey on their forum in march 2022: "We ended the partnership with Honey due to the way their service interacted with affiliate links. Essentially, if someone clicked on a affiliate link (For example, one of ours below in the video description on YouTube), and then if they “use honey” and search for a deal, Honey will override that tracking link even if they don’t find you a deal. ".
https://linustechtips.com/topic/1415146-weekly-sponsorship-suggestioncomplaint-thread-feb-28-2022/
When they defended themselves against the recent accusations, that they didn’t make enough noise when dropping Honey in 2022, their defence was that they thought that only creators were disadvantaged (a few 100 people?). They claim to have been unaware that the users of Honey (the hundreds of thousands of LTT viewers) were being disadvantaged as well. They also seemed to be unaware that Honey’s behaviour is likely illegal, at least LTT made no mention on the legality of it. https://therecenttimes.com/news/linustechtips-addresses-megalags-honey-allegations-defends-transparency Which checks out with their 2022 post.
If they had known that the users of Honey were being bamboozled as well, I’m sure that they would have made a video about it. But making a complaint video to basically say that an ex sponsor was stealing some of their marbles, might have given a bad look. + given more publicity to Honey, which LTT probably didn’t want to happen.
While I see your point, I have to say posting about it on their own forums, where a lot of people that normally see their videos will not see it (since I’m sure that not everyone who subscribes to their main channel also would go to their forums…) I still think it’s pretty shitty to not inform your coworkers (other YouTubers) and especially their viewers who only tune in for videos they find interesting (like me). If they’re screwing over content creators, why would you not assume they’re also doubly screwing the regular joes?
Also, look at GamersNexus. They have no issues letting the people who respect them know when a company is up to no good, which in turn garners them even more respect and adoration.
“Hmm. Point out foul play, but lose out on some of that sweet sweet moolah? Nah. Can’t do that. That might make me look advertiser unfriendly!” Is basically what you’re getting at. I think that is a shitty mindset to have when shilling for companies.
Of course, no disrespect towards you, and I absolutely thank you for bringing this to the conversation. I was not aware of it because I am not that deep in the Linus Tech Tips community, I just find some of their videos fun/interesting.
LTT is entertainment, I wouldn’t expect in depth reporting from them. They don’t have that anal retentive attention to details/all angles that Gamer’s Nexus or Louis Rossman have. If LTT made videos where they attack stuff that they think is wrong, then I’d expect them to go on their face more often than not. And attacking large companies with a poorly constructed case, would always come back to bite them in the ass.
Very few people can do the kind of repeated reporting that Gamer’s Nexus and Louis Rossman do + stay in business. I can’t blame LTT for sticking to what they’re good at (superficial entertainment).
"That might make me look advertiser unfriendly!” Not what I was saying at all. I said that in the context of the time it might have made them look unnecessarily greedy to the public + provide free advertising + extra users for Honey.
So the scenario is that they know Honey is losing them money, but it’s saving user’s money by finding them great deals (since that part of the controversy wasn’t known at the time).
And you are proposing they make a video complaining about it. A big YouTuber millionaire telling people “hey, I know this extension is making you money, but please consider not using it because we are profiting off of our affiliate links less when you do and our profits are more important than your savings”.
How do you think that would go? We all know how such a video would be received.
You would simply tell your side of the story, and give caution to users of the extension that shady behavior like that is always accompanied by even more shady stuff.
Not really that hard to do, and you gave the info out to people who will dedicate their time (as MegaLag did) into looking into it either for their own interests or to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Except it wasn’t saving people money. It actually was hiding coupons from users.
But like they wrote, that wasn’t known at the time.
I mean it seems totally on brand for Linus, especially after auctioning off 1 of 1 prototypes he promised to give back months ago. Only to hide behind the fact the auction was for charity.
Hah, yeah I guess he does own goal to protect others often.
That’s an egregious mistake of a logistics employee wrongly asset tagging a prototype, ending up creating a huge controversy. Linus never named the employee and took all the heat on himself even though the situation had nothing to do with him.
Making a big deal out of Honey taking creator’s money would again move all the heat on him while warning other creator’s. But I think it would go just as bad.
Selling the prototype was only a small part of the issue. They also tried to ruin the brand by testing it on hardware it was explicitly said not to be compatible with, later stating that it was not worth $500 to redo those tests. And then went on to state they had come to an agreement with said company to reimburse them, which turned out to be false. They had just sent their first email in ages to them minutes before posting that statement.
Yes, it was really bad.
I question your assertion that it was purposefully done as a secret conspiracy to ruin a random brand. Don’t attribute to malice what can adequately explained by stupidity.
No, they weren’t trying to ruin the brand, they were trying to make a YouTube video, made a bad job with multiple compounding mistakes, and ended up hurting the brand without that being their intention.
That one looks like an honest mistake.
The obvious contempt linus showed for the sloppy prototype and its extortionate cost is an aggravating factor however.
Spineless tech tips
I think they talked about it on WAN show and said that other creators already knew which is why you haven’t really seen Honey ads anymore even before the recent video came out and they didn’t know about the consumer issues so they didn’t think it warranted a video.
Tell that to all the creators who are coming out and screaming that they never knew and are anxious to join the class action lawsuit that Legal Eagle and Wendover productions is bringing.
Linus is really, really shitty at responding to criticism. I don’t think it’s malice, it just didn’t occur to them.
He should just be upfront and say “you know what? We should have done better here”. That’s it.
I don’t watch the WAN show because it’s not really my type of content. Haven’t they addressed concerns before on their main channel, or am I mistaken? If they found out Honey was scamming them, and just assumed other YouTubers knew or their audience, why not just make a quick video about it with a more in depth talking about it on the WAN show?
This gist of it from the WAN show was this:
- They were unaware that it was intentionally not looking for the best deals (thus, scamming the consumer)
- They stopped advertising Honey because of the referral hijacking
- A ton of creators knew about it, and had already dropped Honey (people just talked about it via DMs, not publicly)
- This all happened when YouTubers were getting shit on for even doing ads/sponsors, and they didn’t want to make a video that was basically “stop using this thing that saves you money because it takes my money” (see first point)
Again, I must bring the point that you can still say your side of the story (here is what we found out about Honey) and caution users of the extension to be wary of not only this shady business, but that who knows what else they might be doing.
Do people really think that someone with the platform as big as Linus Tech Tips shouldn’t bring awareness to such topics? Why not? Especially if you were once shilling for them??
They’ve only made a standalone video addressing stuff a few times on their channel, the vast majority of the time they save it for WAN Show or at most a community post.
I’m trying to remember if they have, I feel like most of the addressing of problems with sponsors has either been done on the forums or on the WAN show. And the reason why they probably don’t do that unless it’s like a really bad consumer affecting thing is because of how big LTT is now making a quick video isn’t really as easy as for smaller creators. It’s the classic problem of smaller companies or creators being much more nimble and agile to react and make quick videos about things compared to a bigger company like LTT that has writers that have to write the video, then they have to schedule a time to film it and since Linus would probably host would have to wait for him to be available, then it goes off to an editor to be edited, a thumbnail artist makes a thumbnail for it, and it’s slotted into the upload schedule which already has a number of other videos in it. It’s just a much longer and more expensive process that makes creating a quick video not as much of an option anymore, especially considering YouTube will punish your future videos if you upload a video that doesn’t do as well. I still think they should have talked about it or atleast looked into it a bit more and realized there was a lot more going on but I understand why they didn’t.
I’m happy to be corrected, but my understanding is this all stems from a MegaLag video published a month ago. There would be no need for LegalEagle to republish all the claims and it understandably takes some time to file suit. In short, the info was already out there for everyone to see.
I’m pretty sure ltt stands for Linus tech tips here
Good looking out. Way too many acronyms in this thread related to YouTube drama that I frankly don’t care about.
You are absolutely correct. I hadn’t thought about that. I will try to use the full name first from now on and then the acronym afterwards to make it easier for all to know what is what.
Thank you for bringing that to my attention!
I watched the MegaLag video, and I may be mistaken, but he is the one that said LTT never said anything to anyone and just let it go. Thats what I’m referring to.
The very first time I saw an ad for Honey I knew there had to be a catch. Nothing is ever free.
It wasn’t immediately obvious how they were going to make money, though. I figured they’d just sell gather and sell user data. I had completely forgotten about affiliate links. But they probably also sell your data for good measure.
There are plenty of free things on the Internet. You’re commenting on a free social network.
I pay $100/month for internet access.
Lemmy may be free to access, but certainly not free to host. Am I paying for it personally? No, but someone is.
You also don’t see Lemmy paying hundreds of YouTubers and influencers for ad spots.
Lemmy may be free to access, but certainly not free to host. Am I paying for it personally? No, but someone is.
Kind reminder to donate to whoever is hosting your instance. Covering a share of costs increases the chances they will continue running it.
Wow, internet is expensive where you are. I pay £28 (about $35) a month for 1gig up/down in the UK.
internet in the states and canada can be so expensive :( i’m lucky that my provider has a program for ppl on disability where we pay $10-$20 CAD/mo. I can’t remember the exact amount, nor what up/down we get right now, but it’s pretty decent!
Capitalists hate competition, and ISPs have it down to a science.
I pay $100/month for internet access.
Irrelevant to the point, but damn that feels so high. I pay something like 30 or 40 euros per month for symmetric 500 megabit, in one of the countries with the highest internet prices in Europe.
Lemmy may be free to access, but certainly not free to host. Am I paying for it personally? No, but someone is.
Well yes, someone is, but my point was, there are loads of examples on the Internet where something truly is free to use and hosted by someone who doesn’t ask for anything. There is real altruism to be found here.
You also don’t see Lemmy paying hundreds of YouTubers and influencers for ad spots.
Yes, this is where the difference comes in. When something is free AND the people running it have ridiculous amounts of money to spend on sponsorships and ads… Then you can be sure there’s a catch.
What lemmy bad?
The catch about Lemmy is that degenerates like me are here
It’s not, my point was more that you see a lot of things being hosted on the Internet for free just out of people’s goodness and curiosity.
Honey is not one of them. But it’s not the fact that Honey is free to use that’s the suspicious part. It’s the fact that they had an awful lot of money to spend on sponsor spots for a free product/service.
I help pay for my instance to run, nothing is free but there is freeloading. Otherwise someone is else pays for the electricity that powers my server requests as I shitpost on lemmy
Lemmy isn’t paying out the nose for influencers to hook their stuff. I haven’t seen any Lemmy instances advertise at all, much less to the extent that Honey has.
Yes, that’s the major difference, but the original comment pointed out you can’t have free things without getting assfucked one way or another. You can, but those free things don’t spend millions on advertising themselves.
It’s definitely not 2005 any more.
It’s not, but go look on github. There are so many projects out there that aren’t monetized. People just built them for the fun of it.
Hell, the entire KDE software suite is not monetized to the best of my knowledge. They ask for donations, but they don’t make a buck off you in any way unless you voluntarily donate.
The icing on the cake was lying about the best deals when partnered stores paid them to do so.
There are so many online companies that do this, like Glassdoor. They are willing to share any information they have about a place until they’re paid to remove it. Goes for bad reviews and salary info as much as it does for coupon codes.
There was a video years and years ago where they explained their business model and it has either since changed or they lied. Back then it was that they offered deals through sponsorships or something. I don’t remember. It was years ago. What’s frustrating is that I remember seeing that video and it definitely made me think it wasn’t a scam. Probably had the same effect on a lot of other people too.
Nothing is ever free.
TANSTAAFL comrade!
Tanstaafl
I’ve never seen an ad for honey, not heard of it’s existence before this video.
Ad blocking is the way
Hmm ad blocking is not enough, because many YouTubers sponsor Honey inside of their videos. Maybe you also use Sponsorblock.
No I didn’t use sponsor block, I often manually skip sponsored sections.
But none of the channels I follow shill for honey, apparently, and that’s a big plus.
I use Sponsorblock, but still hear ads sometimes because it’s not applied to downloads.
So you don‘t use extensions at all then because you‘re already sniffing the uBlock Origin scandal?
Frankly I’m surprised it took this long for anyone to notice they were swapping referral codes. I always assumed that was what was in it for them. Perhaps the extent to which they’ve done it is greater than we knew, but if you have ever heard of referral codes, it seems obvious that this is how such an extension would monetize.
Reminds me of Opera GX with their sponsors and everyone used their browser.
Saved you a click
Among other accusations, MegaLag said that if a YouTuber or other creator promotes a product through an affiliate link, if the viewer has installed Honey, the extension will surreptitiously substitute its own link when the viewer makes a purchase — even if Honey didn’t provide any discounts. That means Honey, not the creator, receives the affiliate revenue for the transaction.
If they’d just been a little less greedy, and only inserted their affiliate link for purchases where none was originally present, and actually provided the service they advertised rather than ‘partnering’ with merchants to provide worse coupons, they’d probably never have gotten caught and if they had, nobody would have cared. Could have skimmed a significant but lesser amount forever. But no, they had to go full on villain, and here we are.
Having a pressure point against the shops by letting them control what kind of coupons would be shown was probably a big reason they weren’t just kicked out of at least some of those affiliate programmes.
That’s a fair point, but they could have been up front about it, or at least adjusted their advertising some. They basically told consumers “We’ll get you the best deal, and if we don’t find one, it doesn’t exist”, which is a spurious claim anyway, but it surely misled people. They could have just said “We’ll see if we have any coupon codes available” or something less committal. There still would have been a lot of value for regular consumers… if you weren’t using a coupon code, 5% off is better than nothing and if they weren’t being dicks about the referral links, nobody likely would have cared in the slightest.
I mean, yeah, they suck. But honestly, a crowdsourced database of coupons feels like it isn’t a good fit for a for-profit company anyway.
Also worth noting that they don’t actually find you the best coupons available. They partner with retailers to get an approved list of coupon codes that they will allow. So claims of always finding you the best price are just false.
Saved me a watch too, thanks!
I agree that Honey is a sleazy extension, but should I be worried that if they lose, it will set a bad precedent? From the video, the Honey extension works by injecting a Honey referral code into all online shopping transactions, possibly overwriting whatever influencer referral code the user was under. If Honey loses, the court decision is likely to say that an extension creator is liable if they tamper with referral codes and tracking links.
This will be a problem for privacy extensions that strip out tracking cookies and referral URLs, since they are also messing with influencer attribution, though not for profit but at the request of the user.
Not a lawyer but I think the fact that honey profited, like, a lot from this is a key factor. From my understanding it’s hard to say what they didn’t wasn’t straight up theft. What’s more, they lied about what they were doing so the consumer was unaware of the ‘product’ they were getting. So while I get your concern, I wouldn’t be too worried about precedent here. It’s less ‘this should be made illegal!’ and more ‘they def committed several actual crimes’
In such case, my opinion would be that referal stripping should be OK. It is the customer choice, even if automated, and the extension clearly tell what he does. You can see it, using the metaphor used in the video exposing the problem, as just not giving the referal card the store salesman gave you.
In the case of Honey, they do it behind the customer back, and the original video metaphor is quite right. They could at least ask i f the user wish to attribute the sale to Honey instead of whatever influencer/website originally pointed you to the product, but they don’t.
I’m thinking this lawsuit will be more about how they wronged creators, and less about how they wronged customers. I don’t expect there to be any justice or concern for the customers who were wronged. Therefore, I agree with TAG, I would worry that them losing would set a bad precedent, and possibly make it so that tampering with referral codes, tracking links, etc isn’t allowed anymore because it hurts creators and sellers/companies, and thus that could outlaw adblockers entirely by extension which would not be great.
That’s like worst-case scenario, though, I don’t necessarily expect that to happen, but I think it’s possible.
The issue here isn’t that the tracking link has been tampered with, but that it was done without the user’s informed consent.
Honey doesn’t advertise how it makes its money to consumers; it is just a fancy plug-in that could save you money.
That is not the issue at all. This lawsuit has nothing to do with user of honey, only on behalf of creators and affiliate marketers. Langley in part because users of honey signed a class action waver and makes it a sticky issue to also include them in the lawsuit.
One of the lawyers taking part in it explicitly points this out: https://youtu.be/ItiXffyTgQg?t=182
Nah, honey was marketed as a coupon tool without mentioning the referral manipulation it did that is its actual business model. Those privacy extensions just need to call out that they remove referral trackers too and everything is fine with them.
Not a lawyer and haven’t seen the lawsuit but I’ve watched a lot of legal eagle and other lawyers and I suspect it’s not about them manipulating codes. I also doubt this is the sort of case trying to set a precedent in any legal sense.
Likely it’s just boring fraud because they deceived content creators and users with lies to make money.
A different company doing the same thing but being honest might be unethical and terrible but probably wouldn’t be sued.
I don’t see a problem if they let the user know what those extensions are doing, unlike Honey.
Not an issue because FOSS
I don’t actually care since I would remove affiliate tags by hand - some shops put a markup on the items to offset commissions - but the audacity is quite something.
You should look into what this is about
I did. And as I said, it’s a shit business tactic. But for someone who doesn’t support affiliate links whatsoever, the impact is net zero.
Thank god, we were all worried for you
There aren’t creators you like and think they deserve some of the cut? If there isn’t an increase in price, then that just means less of the money is going to the business, and some of it is going to a creator you enjoy.
I’m not buying anything recommended by creators, unless from their own shops in which case they get the full revenue either way.
If there is a product they recommend that I might be interested in, I’ll research prices and guaranteed find a better deal elsewhere.
I don’t use subscription services at all save for two very specific use cases and don’t play games, so all the vpns, online academies, website business, mmorpgs and whatever they are pushing really doesn’t phase me. If (and that’s a big if) they even make it through sponsorblock in the first place.
Everything you listed are common sponsorships. I have never bought a YT sponsorship, so there’s no argument there. But affiliate links are more than just those sponsored posts. Amazon is a commonly used affiliate program. For example, someone might link to the tools they use and like. I watched a carpenter who linked to the tools he used, and it was also an affiliate program. He wasn’t paid by anyone to link them like a sponsorship, he was just sharing in his experience what tools he likes best. If I trust his judgement in tools, and want to buy the same ones, assuming camelcamelcamel shows it a good price and checking around doesn’t find it cheaper, why wouldn’t I want them to get a cut of that purchase?
I dislike affiliate links from a privacy perspective. I don’t want to be tracked via my purchase to some creator’s channel that would link my person to certain interest groups. I’m breaking those chains wherever there is a chance, usually by manually copying links and cutting off the tracking bit, or if it’s a URL shortener like bit.ly and the likes, I’ll open it in a private window and then copy the resolved URL minus tracking bit into my main browser window.
I am up to speed on this little drama, but it’s still unclear to me what they’re suing over.
Yea, Honey effectively took over affiliate links. And yes, they were obviously shady (I never used it, because I did not know how they made money). But I don’t quite understand how other people trying to make money from affiliate links have a real claim against them.
Or is this just a case of the influencers realizing they have the moral high ground and the public’s ear, and wanting a pay out?
It’s fraud. They publicly claimed, point-blank, to do a certain thing for years, and were instead doing the opposite, in the interest of making more money. The affiliate link thing is only one of several points that they’re suing over. The far more egregious one is that they don’t actually “scour the internet to find you the best coupons” They will actively hide better coupons that they know about, if marketplaces pay them to, and still tell you in the browser “this is the best coupon.”
It’s more than that, at least from a EU perspective. Don’t know what is legal in the US, but manipulating URLs in an obviously malicious way and without the user’s explicit knowledge and consent would be highly illegal here.
The YouTubers can only sue for actual damages THEY realized.
As the class is for content creators that partnered with Honey, it can only be for the affiliate links.
Users will need to sue separately, either individually or as a different class. My money is on them having a forced arbitration clause, so direct lawsuit will most likely be out of the question.
It’s not just youtubers. It’s anyone who uses affiliate links. Online ads use affiliate links.Things like Amazon Smile used affiliate linking for charity fundraising.
And since Honey was jacking links class action is the only way for them to really do it. No individual affiliate can point out their individual loss through Honey because Honey erased their links.
That means the class action needs to go after all affiliate revenue Honey has ever made.
After reviewing the actual legal filing, you’re correct. I somehow missed that.
All persons (corporate or individual) in the United States who participated in an Affiliate Program with a United States online merchant and had affiliate attribution redirected to Paypal as a result of the Honey browser extension.
Thanks for the clarification.
The other lawyer in the case, Attorney Tom made a video going over what they are sueing for and some of the misconceptions.
https://youtu.be/ItiXffyTgQg?feature=shared
People have a claim due to lost profits and potentially missed business opportunities.
Let’s Youtuber A had a sponsor affiliate and a spoken ad spot. Creator makes 2k for the sponsor read and 2% every time someone buys something via link. Honey swoops in and steals the affiliate link (regardless if the user got a coupon or not). The creator no longer getting the 2% and skews the success of the ad.
The creator’s ad performance (ad to finished transaction) is down, so sponsor lowers the commission to 1% and 1.5k for the next video. Enough people use honey and the metrics are bad enough the sponsor doesn’t renew contract with the creator.
On the consumer end, which due to arbitration clauses the lawyers aren’t actively pursuing (at this time) (see linked video).
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Sorry, posted that on mobile without checking that it’s not the mobile link.
The video has links in the description to the complaint.
[Here it is on Court Listener](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69503243/9/wendover-productions-llc-v-paypal-inc/
Edit: To your other point. Why should Honey take money away from actual referrers when they didn’t even provide a discount code?
